Age of Empires 4 to use analytics-based tutorials

Solutions from mobile game development are finding their way to other platforms. PC strategy Age of Empires 4 will collect and anlyze players’ data to offer personalized tutorials.

Age of Empires 4

That’s according to Adam Isgreen, the game’s creative director, who talked to PCGamesN.

The devs are “leveraging a ton of things […] like compute power that we have available to us now to do analytic-based tutorialising, and all kinds of things where we can see how players are playing and be like, ‘Hey! Did you know you can do this? Or hey, this cool thing that you’re not doing?’

The advantage of this approach that no previous game in the series has used is that it makes it possible to more effectively onboard new players, Isgreen explains .

When developing free-to-play mobile games, these solutions are used all the time. This is an industry standard. However, for paid PC titles, especially those centered on single-player experience, these tools are something new.

Age of Empires is a series of real-time strategies. Its key feature is the ability, during one session, to switch between centuries for your nation (for example, from the Stone Age to the Bronze Age). Essentially, it’s about upgrading buildings and units,which give an advantage on the battlefield. The first game of the series came out in 1997.